Folding Forum

Hats off to the F@H crew for the SMP client load sharing mechanism.

My kids wanted to play Starcraft II with dad (when you're young, it's great fun beating up on Pop), and I ran the SMP -bigadv on my home computer while playing. SCII is very CPU intensive, and we are playing at 1920x1080 resolution on "fast" + "Ultra" graphics settings with 3 computer opponents, and 3 human players. For the non-gaming crowd, that's a lot of load on any computer.

My machine didn't skip a beat. It downscaled the SMP client perfectly, and the game was very smooth, even though the FAH settings are "all cores".

Now if you could get the GPU clients to do that (pause is busted, you must quit the client, then remember to turn it back on)...

AFAIK, the CPU has a Task Manager that manages all the CPU cycle allocation and everything (will vary from OS to OS). Unfortunately, there isn't any equivalent Task Manager for the GPU yet. This is something that is GPU Vendor specific (possibly OS specific too) so until they develop something like that, PG can't do much.

I don't have such good experience with the a3 core backing off but its not something I hold against a core for a high performance client. as long as you have at least a dualcore processor, poorly multi-core optimised applications such as sc2 shouldn't be affected by the core. what I found interesting though is that sc2 manages it's cpu affinities, it only uses evenly numbered cores.

There's a good chance that FAH may soon only use even numbered core (with the exception of perhaps 3, 5, 7, and 9). There was a post by Kasson some time back about not using large prime numbers. Unfortunately, he didn't defined "large" but maybe that includes 11, 13, 17, 19 ...)